Column: Giving thanks

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, we are constantly reminded about what we should be thankful for.

Beyond the usual clichés, I have many things on my list to be thankful for. I am thankful that I have less than a month of classes before I graduate early in December. I am very grateful for the strong recovery of my boyfriend’s dad after his recent open-heart surgery. I am thankful for the opportunity to present you with an unprecedented color issue today. I am also thrilled that Lehigh students once again have access to daily copies of The New York Times, which had been taken away for the better part of the semester.

While it took me some time to compile that tiny list of things that I am grateful for, I found it much easier to list all the jobs and tasks that I have done lately that are pretty much thankless. For example, Runner’s World magazine launched its new website this week. As an intern at RW, I have been helping the online team to develop the new site and get it ready for it’s unveiling. If you go to the site, though, you will not see what I have done. In fact, if I’ve done a good job, you wouldn’t even know my job exists.

As of press time, I have spent a little less than 150 hours working on moving articles to the new site and reformatting their HTML, which (as my boss Chris says) isn’t exactly “journalism with a capital J.” So what do I actually do each day? I spent hours getting rid of extra line breaks, adding photos, writing decks and assigning articles to their proper departments and topics on the website. My most recent task is to edit articles whose image links are broken, meaning the image URLs are no longer live because they were attached to the old site. For every one of the 1,033 stories, I have to go into the HTML coding and delete all the coding from the missing images. It may not seem like much work, but I’ve spent almost 20 hours on the project, and I’m not done yet.

But would any of you have realized that job was out there? Probably not, unless the site looked like a complete mess. Then you might have been quick to point out all the errors. This is just one of many jobs in the world of journalism that goes unnoticed when the worker has actually done his or her job correctly.

Take copy editors. They fix writers’ grammar and make their words look and sound pretty, but their names don’t appear next to the articles they edit. However, copy editors are OK with that because that’s the job they signed up for.

What’s usually not OK is when readers anonymously mail in a clipped article with corrections and notes like, “Great article, but where’s the editor?” That’s when copy editors start to feel unappreciated.

As editors, we take note of those corrections and move on because you can never please everybody. And unless you’ve worked for a publication, I don’t believe you can understand how much work goes into every inch of every column of every page of every issue.

Since I’ve already quantified how much time I’ve spent working on RW’s website, I might as well tell you how many hours I’ve physically spent producing the print issues of The Brown and White in my three years as an editor. I’ve estimated that each press night I’ve attended I have spent seven hours on average working on the paper. That number is my shot at trying to average the times when I was an assistant, spending maybe 3-4 hours on each issue, to now-a-days when I’m in charge and can be at a press night for (no lie) 12 hours.

So assuming seven is the best estimate, I’ve spent 986 hours on the third floor of Coppee Hall working with my fellow editors of The Brown and White. That’s 41 days … straight. And that doesn’t include times when I’ve conducted interviews for stories, covered meetings and events, or the many hours I’ve spent working on our website.

But besides using this space to point out how much of my Lehigh career I’ve spent on this paper, I wanted to take some time to thank my fellow editors and writers, because we often work many hours for very little recognition. When we do get feedback from our readers, it is often negative, sometimes constructive and rarely positive. But we still look forward to producing the best newspaper we can each week.

So in this next week when we are supposed to be giving thanks, I will be thinking of my news crew. Because, quite often, our job is thankless.

I would also like to ask our readers to tell a writer when you like a story, or maybe even thank them for covering an event or issue you think is important. As a writer and an editor, I know it means a lot when readers contact us to say they’ve appreciated our work.